hither and yon

Graduation today! Writing a lj/dw post was on my "to do" list before the ceremony to help get closure. Very mix of emotions. Many thin feelings that cannot be caught. 

List: 

• Guilt because I feel like I don't really deserve it? I didn't put much effort into it, refused to really commit, and I fucked up my comprehensive exam. 
• Wondering whether I should have told my dad: that ship has sailed anyway. So now wondering if I should tell my dad. I won't, but I'm still wondering lol.
• Sadness because it's another chapter closing. Unless something goes terribly wrong in my life, this was my last year of school and my last chance to become a good student. Wasted potential. 

But I did finish, and the program helped me open up a lot. I definitely became more comfortable talking during the last three years. Someone even nominated me to be one of the two student speakers at this ceremony, LOL. I did not respond to the nomination, but it was kind of nice. 

I don't know. I feel like I've lost the ability to trace or evaluate my thought processes. And, like many many people across the globe to-day, I feel overwhelming and suffocating anxiety about the Times We Live In. How do "we" communicate and enact and protect our values? Stuff (SOCIETY! CIVILIZATION!!) only works if there is a common understanding, a consensus, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. You can't stop to let a car through if the other lane doesn't stop, either. hashtag chronic stress, hashtag late stage capitalism, hashtag why. Like... how do we function and live IN the world when so many people just have no interest in ever ever ever listening? Like people whose reality is built ONLY around responding to their own deep festering hurt, and won't incorporate logic or compassion because it doesn't serve their... principles? idk what the word is. I'm not really asking "what's the ~point~ of empathy" but like... where will it take us, on a global scale? Where does it all go, when the Dark Heart of Humanity just gets deeper and darker? I believe that it all matters, that we have to shape our immediate reality by our day-to-day behaviors, but I also believe that humanity is doing too little, too late and we're actively setting ourselves back from even that minimal amount. 

Good lord, how is this post supposed to help me get ~mindful~ closure???

I put my hand against my neck, my thumb on my throat, and I think about how hard it is to reach myself. Let alone another person. A totally distinct, disparate human being! It doesn't feel alienating though; I feel humbled. I want to make whole other post about IU's Twenty-three and Palette, but for now, the part of Palette that touches me the most is "But still - I was pretty when I sang Good Day,"  saying it like "I saw that I was, wasn't I?" and her singing G-Dragon's rap during her live performances. "Jieun-ah." I've just always like that concept, of being able to stretch your hand through the hazy ~veil~ of time to your previous self and be able to see that you were just so young, and you needed love and support, and you deserved it then and you deserve it now. How to step outside yourself and see that you are just a person, who has fundamental worth, and aren't you somehow wonderful for even being able to recognize that? Doesn't it feel good to use your heart for yourself? There is something really tender about it.

idk, I still feel a lot of shame and derision about old memories, and each time they pop up in my head (which is pretty often, because of anxiety and school and social incompetence), I just feel like running a sword straight through past!me. Seeing all the stuff that's obvious to me now but was totally unknown and inaccessible to me then. Time is like running water that softens the sting of the really embarrassing stuff. Nothing changes the ~past~ but perspective, and it's not like your past mistakes get better, but you're just able to embrace yourself. Like sticking yourself with metaphorical blades doesn't serve a purpose for you anymore - it doesn't obliterate what actually happened, who you actually were then. And the pain you cause yourself stops becoming a virtue, and is instead just itself. "Be who you needed when you were younger" + "As adults, we try to develop the traits that would have saved our parents." 

Ugh now it's 4:00pm and I have to go to rehearsa! I didn't get to what I wanted in this post. I wanted to feel restful at the end of it lol. Oh well, what the hell. 
 

Where's that tumblr text post that's like, "me: starts a post about my mental health / me: never mind. let's internalize this one, buddy." That's what the past like three years have been like. I don't know how to deal with things. My mind vice just keeps gnashing away at these thoughts until I "forget" them, which is a forgetting of the event, not of the content - like, I just forget that I had certain thoughts or feelings in a certain wording, but the thoughts/feelings still live on in an amorphous poison cloud in my bodily tissues and such. Is this a gross visual? Whatever. I tromp forward with vigor!!

The guessing game for the 21st century: Did I just think it or did I tweet it? Like traveling through a murky, boring mirror funhouse.

Here are some things that made me feel some feelings:

"It's been so hard, not knowing what it's about" (paraphrased from this fic): This is a really difficult part of life, to me. The incomprehensibility of it. Not active confusion, really, just the sense that I don't know what's going on or why I'm doing what I'm doing, why I want what I want, what's expected of me and what I feel about it.

I started watching Crazy Ex Girfriend a few weeks ago and I really love and feel for Rebecca. I cried during that episode where they go to the beach, just the scenes where she's in the bus, so lonely and lost. Trying really hard to keep up and figure it out.

idk, I'll just totally surrender the fight of trying to phrase things in, like... a readable way, lol. To me, the things Rebecca does are because she doesn't know what else to do. And she doesn't know why she does them, either. When you don't know what you want, or why you want it, or how to get what you want - there's no way to organize anything in your head or heart. You can't put things into context. It's a jumble and you're left with just trying to deal with things as they come, a one-on-one basis, but life is so fucking confusing that doing things that way results in fucking nonsense and chaos. Because without any sense of a stable bigger picture, you're left with reacting based on your emotions at the time. But your emotions are already a mess, just an ocean that's always moving, waves and waves and currents and rocks and spray, too many components and forms it can take, too vast to get a hold of. It's hard. Not knowing what it's about.

"Let it be willing": Sort of a more graceful way of being like, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"? Except not really. (SEE ABOVE: GIVING UP ON TRYING TO READABLE). I've been ~mulling this over because of Gansey wrt the Raven King (this) and Bucky wrt Civil War (this). And in some sense, existential therapy (in the Frankl school), which says there is so much you can't control. Accept that, and find the bounds of what you can control, and make meaning out of it. The choice you make matters to you, even if it doesn't or can't reach anyone else. This is hard for me, and also why "seeing" it is very moving and affecting to me? Because it's like, even if you can't believe in yourself, you can believe in the value of your choice. I find it very beautiful. The way you can transform the nature of an action. You can think: In the end, it doesn't matter, because the result is the same. A death is a death, suffering is suffering. But no, not all the time. It does make a difference. Here we are, in a world of chaos and meaning. Walk into it, unburden yourself however you can. That Bucky fic makes me want to cry every time. "'Do what you think is best,' he says. 'I have.'" Something about grace. Something about acting in ways that you can be proud of, in retrospect and remembrance. Something about how love really is powerful - the only way out of the flat, terrible circle of violence - and sometimes intention does matter. 'The heart goes on and on and does not stop.' Something something something.


I made a 7+ minute long ~vlog~ while driving home yesterday where I mostly repeated, "Why does life feel like this?" over and over. Not even "why do I feel like this?" or "why is life like this?" Why does it FEEL? LIKE? THIS? When will it stop? Or more practically, when am I going to accept it? I have to heave my sadsack body through space and time, PUSHING IT AGAINST THE GROUND AND THROUGH THE AIR, insisting upon my own existence even though I don't even fucking want to exist. Isn't that just a hell of thing? Life goes on until it decides not to, or until you make it stop. I ask you, how is that fair?! It should be a fucking opt in system, not an opt out. Ughhhhhkl;wejrkl;jasdf;klhlkasdf

I would like to conclude this post by saying I wrote this all in a crowded Starbucks, EVEN THOUGH I'm sitting right next to counter and my screen is not facing the wall.

I just feel like posting!! Everyone ignore this. It is just me copy+pasting all my non-mentions, non-links from twitter today. (For the record, I am not really interested in One Direction; I just like lurking around people I lurked around in bandom, and using the group as a mirror for SHINee, and I like Zayn. boybandatron!!) 


( wurr and turr )

OKAY ALSO the Postal Service (the band, not the actual postal service just btw) is making me feel old. I remember listening to Give Up in high school, junior year English specifically even, and now they are coming back with a new album, which is neat-o, except they said "TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY." WHAT THE FUCK, I didn't need to know that!!!! Just shut up and do your job, Postal Service!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I haven't knitted at all today :c